DOL Unpacked

I completely agree with the points made by Darren Crovits, in regards to his position on DOL’s, and how there effectiveness is minimal because they are not tuned to the students learn.  DOL’s from what I can remember only critic one style of writing—American Standard English. This automatically sets students up for failure because the teacher is essentially assuming the student “should” know the correct grammatical form. I can see this being harmful for ESL students, because they are not learning the “why” or how to look for it in their personal live. Thus making a permanent change rather than focusing on how to get the points. Crovitz mentioned how language errors were primarily treated as learner deficiency rather than an opportunity for the instructor to demonstrate another that applies to the way that students learn. Which is nonsense, since it would be the ethical thing teachers are supposed to do, right? I understand that teachers “barrow” lesson plans, pedagogies and, other insightful material. Yet at this point Crovits (I believe) is showing how indolent it is making them. DOL’s take up about ten-fifteen minutes of class time, if the focus is only on how to make the sentence correct, that does not leave time for the why and how for those who don’t understand. Thus the saga of red marks continues.

To combat this problem, my group and I have come up with an alternative DOL lesson that focuses on the context and situation. Our task was to transform simple sentences into another way of saying them. An example(s) from the article was:

Starter sentence:

You’re fired.

Transformed sentence (basically another way of saying something):

Sorry, Bob, but with the poor economy we have to let you go.

I’m breaking up with you.

My group and I came up with three starter sentences of our own:

Lemme geta numba nine wit some mac sauce (Almost everyone I know back home orders from McDonalds like this…even Beyoncé)

Dude let’s hangout!

President Obama, it was my absolute pleasure and joy getting to chauffeur you around.

Within our lesson plan, I believe our goal is in essence to teach our classmates how to codeswitch; in their writing and while they are dealing with certain groups or people. Like—you wouldn’t talk to me—a student and friend and manager and coworker and club member the way you would your mother or boyfriend or sister or professor. This lesson will prepare them to deal with a mass of different types and kinds of people because of diverse saying one thing can be. To make sure our classmates truly understand our lesson we will give each group a series of sentence and ask them to transform them. Then, choosing the one they like they will act it out and give a short explanation of how transforming the sentence change the context (relationship) of the situation. I think this also help our classmates with reading material from other classes as well since they will be able to differentiate the material accordingly rather than seeing every piece of reading material as a chore or a textbook. (If they do not already like reading)